The UIQ Evangelist

(Updated)

Some time ago - I’ve forgotten how long ago it was, I’m afraid - I had already re- sorted my record collection, dusted the bookshelf, sat in quiet contemplation for a few hours, studying the frame on the TV set, and tried to learn walking on my hands while whistling Alte Kameraden - before I thought: “I know, I’m going to write the Sony Ericsson call center. Maybe it’ll be slightly more loads of fun than going to bed early”.

Here’s the message in full, written through the five line high text- box on SE’s astonishingly welcoming support- pages.

Email:
To: questions.no@support.sonyericsson.com
From: nn@vfemail.net
Product: P1i
Opinion: Halloen.

I have a few questions:
1. Opera has no official support any longer for Opera 8.65 - when will SE intend to seek a fix for the input- text problem with Opera text- fields (pasting text is limited to about 300 characters).
2. When will the wlan control panel be improved upon. Currently, it is easy to lock up (hit search, then quit before it resolves. Or hit “information” while the network scan is taking place), and unpredictable things happen. Neither is there an external api for wlan searching, something that is needed for various types of functionality such as notifications for when you are inside a wlan zone, or in a specific wlan.
3. When will the connection- priorities be fixed? At the moment, the priority- list is broken when using java- applications alongside native apps. This definitively can be considered a showstopper - any new user will encounter this sooner or later (this goes for all UIQ3 models).
4. When will profiles be implemented, or the apis needed to implement one be provided? No other smartphone on the market has this weakness, and it can be remedied fairly easily.
5. How come undo/redo is not more extensively used throughout the UI on the phone? The functionality is indeed available - it’s just not used in any of the in- built apps. How come?
6. When will the scheduler for push- mail be fixed. What is in place at the moment is not simply rudimentary, but fails to be really useful. At the very least the developer world efforts should be towards mapping what functions could be used in a new app to improve upon this function, and what types of components it’s necessary to use to pull this off (such as how to control the message- server and various registered mail- services - or if externalising this is at all possible).
7. When will the screen- lock behaviour on the p1 and other soft- key UIQ phones be fixed. The phone still unlocks in the pocket when someone calls - which is unhelpful to say the least when the touch- screen is slightly more responsive than your average hardware- button.
8. When will it be possible to stream a video- file or any real media file, without the phone locking up, or the connection dropping out? Any UIQ3 phone will consistently drop the video stream after a few minutes. It’s also not possible to play sound while the program is in the background - limiting it’s usefulness.

I’d be thankful for any response.

-jj

p.s. In any case, by all means do visit the bug- list portion of the UIQ3 wiki:
http://uiq3.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Phones/P1i#R6G04_reference_list

Although I of course never gave up hope that there would eventually be a response, I was nevertheless somewhat surprised and elated when suddenly I received this fantastically encouraging e-mail in return yesterday:

Dear Mr. Johnsen,

Thank you for contacting Sony Ericsson Call Center.

We apologize for the delay in this reply.
We are greatful for your feedback and have registered this as suggestions for P1i. At present time there are however no more changes planned for Sony Ericsson P1i so it’s very unlikely that this will be changed. [emphasis mine] If you run into problems developing an application for the phone we recommend that you visit www.sonyericsson.com/developer for more information and support.

Regarding #7 this is according to the specification of the product and not a bug. It’s how it works in all our products.
Regarding #8 we recommend that you try this using 3G. If you are connected though WLAN with a router that has problems handling RTSP you may encounter this problem. If we for example try streaming through a Dlink DIR-655 from mobil.svt.se we can’t find any problem.

Best regards,
/Rickard
Sony Ericsson Call Center

E-mail: questions.se@support.sonyericsson.com, questions.no@support.sonyericsson.com, questions.dk@support.sonyericsson.com, questions.fi@support.sonyericsson.com or questions.ee@support.sonyericsson.com
Web: www.sonyericsson.com

Please contact us again if we can be of further assistance.

Get the most out of your phone!
Take advantage of the Update Service to automatically bring your phone up-to-date with the latest software from Sony Ericsson. Visit www.sonyericsson.com/updateservice to find out more.

“Thank you”, I thought “for answering every single one of my questions so promptly and in such depth, O great Sony Ericsson Call center people. This truly was quite high on the scale of epic responses, almost rivaling the ‘Opera 9 won’t be made available, but have you tried Opera mini?’, and ‘UIQ3 is fully customisable, and therefore has no need for profiles’ responses”. Indeed, I could not but marvel in raptured wonderment at what I might’ve done to deserve such exclusive treatment from SE.

Of course, I could barely contain my sonorous joy even in writing, but I nevertheless made an attempt to contain my mirth, and then type down a response:

Dear SE support dudes,

The developer problems are well known to you and everyone else, as are SE’s resounding lack of response to the entire community, thank you very much. The lack of a real bug- tracker for developer issues - it is currently a single thread on the forum, and continues to be just that after repeated requests for an actual bug- tracker - certainly does not help matters. As one member said, paraphrasing: “you do understand that a lack of a functioning bug- reporting system does not suggest the device has no problems?”.

The same principle applies for end- user support.

#7: Well, yes, I know it’s how your programs function, and that it’s not a bug. What I am telling you is that the soft- buttons on the screen are more responsive than your average mechanical button. Therefore making it very problematic to have the phone in your pocket when someone calls you. This, due to using the softkey- implementation in UIQ3, is also a problem on the g- series, even though it has mechanical buttons also, the m600 and the p990 in f/o mode. In other words, an improvement to this is the least SE should seriously consider including in their phone- tools program, before updating it for /all/ the devices that use it - if SE has any hopes of beginning to patch their broken smartphone line.

#8: There is no problem with the rtsp service, and a number of ports are open for use for udp on any of the systems I’ve tested this on. No other clients on the network had these problems, using either silently incoming ports, or requesting ports from the server directly. Many others have seen the same on their setups as well, and have observed the same problem on a wide open 3g connection. I’ve also confirmed that at least one s60 phone does not have this behaviour

The problem consistently turns up in between ten to fifteen minutes of playback, sometimes earlier. Then, either the connection drops. Or the connection drops and an image will freeze on the screen, making you have to reboot the phone. I have no idea what causes this, but it is not an rtsp problem. Test the bbc pages, or cspan, for example. (There’s also audio only realmedia that is impossible to select or playback from c-span’s archives, while we’re on the subject). There was some speculation that some xml was more equal than other types when launching content, and that the media- player (or some old stack) was used, and that this is where the problem is. I also do not have to tell you that “it works on my end” is not a solution to a user’s problem.

In any case, this is literally a showstopper for streaming media (unless you have Coreplayer). Any radio- streams via rtsp is out of the question as well, due to no multitask. But consistent lack of actual response to any concerns discourage people from reporting their problems to SE. Because they know, with certaintly, that it won’t matter.

This sort of thing probably undermines SE’s push for selling the “SE experience” on the in- built software.

Sincerely yours,
jj

p.s. Thank you for the phone- number, I appreciate it.

The phone- number I thanked Rickard for, was the number to the central switch- board, which is strategically hidden on their main support page - but as the saying goes: it is the thought that counts.

A response turned up, more promptly this time, which almost made me embarassed - for grabbing so much of their valuable time, I mean. They have important business to attend to, after all:

Dear Mr. Johnsen,

Thank you for contacting Sony Ericsson Call Center.

We have previously forwarded the suggestion that you should be able to maintain keylock on even though you have an incoming call. We can however not say when or if such a change will be made in upcoming models.

We have not recieved any complaints here regarding streaming with the P1i that haven’t turned out to be related to the connection (WLAN with no support for RTSP) so we haven’t escalated any problem regarding this. If you could provide a step-by-step on how to reproduce the problem we can esaclate it.

Best regards,
/Rickard
Sony Ericsson Call Center

E-mail: questions.se@support.sonyericsson.com, questions.no@support.sonyericsson.com, questions.dk@support.sonyericsson.com, questions.fi@support.sonyericsson.com or questions.ee@support.sonyericsson.com
Web: www.sonyericsson.com

Please contact us again if we can be of further assistance.

Get the most out of your phone!
Take advantage of the Update Service to automatically bring your phone up-to-date with the latest software from Sony Ericsson. Visit www.sonyericsson.com/updateservice to find out more.

Naturally, I immediately accepted this explanation as sufficient, immediately forgot about every other bug- related issue for 3rd party programs, and certainly was willing to entertain the idea that I, along with several others, had imagined the entire thing.

I mean - as I commented, far be it from mere users to presume they are not at fault when they cannot get their fairly expensive electronic gadget to work as expected. Surely such a thing is unheard of.. (at least at SE’s callcenter).

Dear support folks.

I understand you have done all you can do, and that you have no control over how the phones or the software is developed. I am merely making an observation. Also, the solution to the key-lock problem anyone would choose to implement in the future (hypothetically speaking) might be a good one or a bad one. And in that respect SE could certainly do with contacting regular users of the phones about how to best address the problem. I know many people have thoughtful and varied suggestions they would be more than happy to share with SE. And indeed have.

Steps to reproduce the not exclusive to wlan realmedia problem: Connect via the browser to either bbc’s listen again service, and click the “open in direct link” (as plugin support is not an option on any UIQ phone). Or, go to www.c-span.org, and choose any link of length more than half an hour. Listen to the stream for 10-15 minutes. When it fails (and the media- player simply drops out without any warning), try to reconnect, and search in the stream to where you left off. Try some more, until the player either locks up or refuse to play the stream. Despair.

What causes the screen- lockup is not easy to say. Presumably, it turns up more often after minimising the player due to an incoming call or sms, etc.

I also know that many have reported problems that can be explained by lack of rtsp support, or lack of open ports. But as I said, and pointed out clearly in the wiki (as well as referenced several examples of others who made the same observation) - this is clearly not related to lack of open ports (or, said differently, having support for the rtsp service).

Sincerely yours,
jj

Oh, well. As I am already turning blue from holding my breath, waiting for a response from SE support - or indeed Sony Ericsson in general, when it comes to for example the “Open Letter”, addressed to the new CEO over new year. And since I quickly lose the energy to write much longer, I will simply conclude by thanking Sony Ericsson from the bottom of my heart for deigning to listen to one of their customers with such interest, as evidently they have better things to do during the day. To think that they answered my mail, even though the users are, like in my example, woeful idiots who will simply waste their paid time trying to invent issues that clearly do not exist. Indeed, what users who have problems? SE hasn’t heard of them. Really, why come dragging with any of these issues now?

Or are there any missing features, and very problematic implementations of any SE made software on the UIQ devices - such as in the phone- tools, the screen- lock or the media- player? No one told them, as Rickard explains. Certainly not repeatedly in either mail, on their forums, or in direct letters to the CEO, or on the wiki after prodding from moderators at SE developer world. Suggestions that certainly were not, had they ever been seen, thoroughly ignored. So who could possibly blame SE for missing all of this - I mean, honestly.

And besides, there are planned no more upgrades for the p1, and no updates - so why bother anyway? Indeed, I think that makes absolute sense. And I will certainly brim over with joy once again when SE takes any suggestions from the wiki and implement any half- hearted improvements on any new phones, while ignoring the “old” ones - even though they run on the exact same platform (as described here on this blog in my perpetually running series on OS upgrades). And in the process ruining their chances at promoting both smartphones over the competition, and UIQ in general. Truly, at that point SE will have such gratitude.

But who cares - here’s a picture of a nazi on a trampoline:

Update: Received an answer just now.

Dear Mr. Johnsen,

Thank you for contacting Sony Ericsson Call Center.

We tested this with BBC listen again and where able to get a connectiondrop after about 13 minutes but could not replicate any problem opening it again or with seeking in the stream (tested extensivly). We have forwarded the problem but it’s unfortunatly doubtful if any change in the phone will be made regarding this.

Best regards,
/Rickard
Sony Ericsson Call Center

Extensively tested. Oh, dear. I’m so impressed.

Dear support folks.

In other words, you can finally replicate the problem (partially, because you’re not testing video- clips, or attempt to search before the buffer is read out, or after a buffer attempt fails), like many users have managed already, repeatedly, on many different sources (I simply suggested two common ones, so don’t make it out as if this is a BBC listen again service exclusive). But since it took support a year to come this far and test one media- clip for over ten minutes (an unthinkable ordeal) before telling the users they imagined the whole thing - you’re explaining to me now - that now you won’t fix it?

Also, what about the several other issues I listed - why aren’t you testing those? For example - the copy/paste problem in Opera, for example (which I might remind you Opera instructed me to contact you about), is exceedingly easy to test. So is, by the way, a problem I didn’t mention in mail, but which has been up on the wiki for six months or so. That you can consistently hang OpenOffice by clicking the “task manager” line when you’re viewing a document in landscape mode. This causes an instant reboot. And is probably connected to SEs implementation of the sofkey layout on the p1, as the same behaviour does not turn up on the g- series or the p990.

So there you have two categories of faults - with 3rd party programs (or associated with 3rd party programs) on one hand, and with SE in house implementation on the other. But you’re not going to fix either. Because you were too busy telling users there were no problems for the last six months. Even when you must’ve known that many support requests came after customers contacted 3rd party companies, like Opera or Dataviz.

I am honestly impressed.

Sincerely yours,
jj

Dear Mr. Johnsen,

Thank you for contacting Sony Ericsson Call Center.

We can’t say when or if a change will be made for this as we don’t get this type of information. According to the information we have there are no more changes planned for the phone which is why it’s not certain that this problem will be fixed. What we can do here is to forward it.

The problem with the hang in Quickoffice was forwarded to our development by us on 2008-01-18 but unfortunatly no change is planned for this according to the answer we got in that errand.

Sony Ericsson Call Center has no way of handling questions/problems regarding API’s used for 3:rd party applications or limitations of the phones memory. For support regarding these you must go through our developerportal www.sonyericsson.com/developer.

Best regards,
/Rickard
Sony Ericsson Call Center

E-mail: questions.se@support.sonyericsson.com, questions.no@support.sonyericsson.com, questions.dk@support.sonyericsson.com, questions.fi@support.sonyericsson.com or questions.ee@support.sonyericsson.com
Web: www.sonyericsson.com

Please contact us again if we can be of further assistance.

…

Thank you for your answer,

..So.. do you know why.. this wasn’t targeted for a fix? I guess I might try to ally myself with someone from Dataviz, and beg them to ask SE developer world to look at some way to circumvent the problem - but it’s probably unlikely that they would want to release a new version on a separate license just for one phone. If that’s even possible, as long as SE has bought the product, and probably needs to order fixes like these anyway. Unless they would work for free to promote SE, and offer a patch “to circumvent SE implementation faults”, or something of that sort..

About the other errors - whether I can guess what the problem is or not, I still experience them as a user. And that makes it your responsibility to document them as clearly as possible, and I suppose forward them properly. I obviously don’t know if the customer care department hasn’t done that, of course, or if you played down any errors, and explained them as unconfirmed single instances, because you didn’t care to test them. Or dismissed a problem because the first and best solution to a similar problem worked. And then actually spent time arguing with users over whether they have the problem or not. But.. please use the wiki shortlist if you need any pointers. What’s there is basically condensed from user reports on esato and my-symbian, among other things. Frequently from posts starting with “I have called SE support, and they say everything is fine”.

The wiki shortlist is also limited to clearly observable examples that turn up often - there are no “unconfirmed” problems on the frontpage, or problems that have just been confirmed by me, once, on a random spot. But because there are few if any useful error- messages when the phone croaks, I’m sure you can (vividly) imagine that most users don’t know what happened other than that the phone stopped working.

Other smaller problems have been shifted to the “feature requests”, or not mentioned because they didn’t have anything to do with the reliability of the device, or were unlikely to be accepted as “bugs” (such as UI behaviour, menu order in programs, curious routines on how to deal with everything from notes to quoting in mail). This, while not my first choice, was something I did in order to make sure the focus was put on the actual problems SE had already accepted some interest in fixing. As opposed to simply promoting tiny faults high and low just to make noise. Although I can see now that this was a mistake.

Apart from that - while I sympatise with anyone who can survive working in customer support for any length of time, I really hope you did your work, so you won’t get blamed for this later on.

Sincerely yours,
jj

…Ok, then. Any suggestions about non- violent means to solve this?

Dear Mr. Johnsen,

Thank you for contacting Sony Ericsson Call Center.

We don’t have any information why this was not fixed. We only handle enduser support and if there’s something wrong with an application that is included in the phone (for example crash or hang) we can forward this problem. We can’t handle complaints or problems regarding developer API’s.
As this is a mobile device there are of course limitations to the amount of information it can handle which can be hard to define as it depends on installed applications, free memory and firmware version. As an example it’s not recommended to store more then 1000 contacts in the phone but it’s possible to store 2000. If you store 8000 you may need to make a master reset to get it back to working state again.
We do of course register complaints and feedback of a product in our systems so that our development can get this type of information from our customers but if you want to start some sort of bugtracker we have to refer you to our developerportal or to our main switchboard to get in contact with someone that you can talk to.

Best regards,
/Rickard
Sony Ericsson Call Center

E-mail: questions.se@support.sonyericsson.com, questions.no@support.sonyericsson.com, questions.dk@support.sonyericsson.com, questions.fi@support.sonyericsson.com or questions.ee@support.sonyericsson.com
Web: www.sonyericsson.com

Please contact us again if we can be of further assistance.

Get the most out of your phone!
Take advantage of the Update Service to automatically bring your phone up-to-date with the latest software from Sony Ericsson. Visit www.sonyericsson.com/updateservice to find out more.

Indeed, that was truly helpful. And paying about $1 dollar a minute to listen to more incredibly helpful advice, that seems like such a good idea.

…anyone up on those non- violent suggestions.. soon, please.

Categories: Comments, Sony Ericsson
Tags: site maintenance, support, upgrades